


Vivir sin aire

by rebelwaltz



Category: The Tunnel (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-02-18 19:40:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13107150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelwaltz/pseuds/rebelwaltz
Summary: Someone has been sending Elise some books.





	1. a well staring at the sky

**Author's Note:**

> I can't believe season 3, but I picked up a few details from it and ran!

One day Elise accompanied Karl’s wife into a book store, she said it would be quick and that they could go get lunch afterwards. Laura was supposed to help her find a birthday gift for Karl but she kept getting distracted by various different stores along the way and Elise was seriously contemplating leaving her behind and getting her friend a basket of chocolate or a bottle of wine. Those were simple gifts and didn’t require a deeper understanding of the things he did and didn’t like. If nothing else, Elise could at least do that for Karl, buy him thoughtless gifts.

Elise was starving, though, so she followed Laura only because of the promised lunch; she saw no reason why she should turn down free food. She started wandering around the aisles of books, looking around without paying any mind to where she was going, and a few minutes later Karl’s wife found her observing the novels in the foreign section. She was picking up book after book and looking at their covers with a blank expression on her face. “I didn’t know you enjoyed reading.”

“I don’t,” Elise said as she put the Gabriel García Márquez book back where it was on the shelf, but didn’t look away from it. She was hypnotized, lost in a train of thought that she refused to let herself stay in, but one that was impossible to get out of. “I only collect them. I am fond of looking at books. Certain books.”

Laura was used to Elise’s impulsive comments — as if Elise thought that in order to be polite she absolutely needed to keep a conversation going. This time, though, Elise seemed thoughtful, desperate to speak but desperately fighting the sudden urge, so Laura smiled at her and waited for her to continue, knowing that whatever was going on inside her head was important.

(She sincerely hoped none of her kids turned out like her.)

“It's just… something. A hobby I picked up after last year. I… met someone. She liked to read. She read way too much, actually. I don’t understand how she found the time to do that. It’s weird, I barely have time to take a shower and she had time to read books for leisure.”

Laura chuckled and tried to hide it behind a cough when Elise looked at her curiously. “So your boyfriend..?”

“Left.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don't be, I wasn’t in love with him. You should feel sorry for him, if anything.”

“I see. But you’re in love with her? This woman that you met?”

Elise looked back at the Márquez book after that and merely shrugged. Karl once told her that she had indeed been in love with Eryka, but since she had never loved anyone before, she had nothing to compare it to. Anyone else would probably see it for what it really was, but not Elise. Elise didn’t call it anything because she couldn’t understand the feeling. “Are you all done?” She pointedly glanced at the bag Laura was carrying.

“Oh yeah, of course. We can get something to eat now. I’m starved!”

They walked in silence, with Laura looking at Elise every few seconds, and with Elise pretending like she didn’t notice.

“I don’t mean to pry, but…” Elise gave Laura the _look_ that she’d already grown so accustomed to, and she quickly corrected herself before Elise could go off on a tangent. “Well, of course I do, or I wouldn’t be saying this.” She added with a laugh. “If you ever want to talk about those things or anything, really… I’m willing to listen. Offer my advice, if you want.”

“Karl tried doing that too.”

“What?”

“Giving me advice.”

“Oh?”

“He was terrible at it.”

Laura sighed. “Yes, I imagine he would be.”

During lunch at a quaint little English restaurant, the first one they found along the way, Laura didn’t ask her about her unique food order, but asked her about the woman she had met. _What was she like, how did you meet?_ It wasn’t the conversation she was looking to have with anyone ever again, but Laura was so calm and non judgmental that it managed to break down the walls she forced herself to build around the deposit box she had thrown all of the memories of Eryka Klein in, the box she had promised herself she would never open again.

 _I… didn’t seek her company right away, but I was interested in what she had to say. I even liked the things she said, I looked forward to hearing her talk. She was kind, gentle, warm, she drew me in with her softness and I became attracted by the mystery that she became. I tried to push her away but I couldn’t. I felt like I had a found a home, somewhere comfortable. The sex was good, but I was stupid._ There were tears in her eyes as she started saying those things inside her mind and she was reminded once more why she had shielded herself from all of those thoughts. “She betrayed me.” Elise looked down at her lap, willing the tears to roll back up, but it was useless. She had just let Laura see her cry and she didn’t even like Laura all that much. Proof of the mess Eryka Klein had made of her, proof that she needed to throw the Eryka Klein box away instead of building walls around it.

“She cheated on you?”

Elise shook her head and abruptly changed the course of the conversation: “What kind of wine does Karl like?” She asked, then proceeded to take four pieces of salt covered potatoes at once and shoved them in her mouth.

Laura, thankfully, got the message.

She ended up getting Karl a French bottle of wine and a box of assorted tea to go with it. It was pretty easy.

 

* * *

 

On his birthday party, Karl tried talking to her about Eryka Klein. Elise was absolutely certain Laura must have told him about their almost-conversation the other day, and glared at her for the entire duration of the night.

“You ever think about her?” He asked, tactless, straight to the point as was usually the best way to get something out of Elise.

“Non. I think about the consequences of her involvement in our lives. I think about how she fooled me into a false sense of security and broke my trust. I think about how I failed my colleagues.”

“So you do think about her.” Karl smirked at her, knowingly. “Don’t turn yourself into a martyr, that’s not your style, Elise."

“I don’t think you get it.”

“You fell in love with the wrong person, well, guess what? We’ve all been there. It’s nothing special.”

Elise got up. “Eryka Klein is a killer and a spy. She was worse than just the wrong person.” She said a few words in French that sounded offensive and angry and walked out of the house, leaving an astonished Karl behind.

He followed her, though. He couldn’t let her go like that. “But it ended well, didn’t it? She saved our lives, she didn’t have to do that. Maybe she’s not as evil as you’ve made her out to be. Some things just aren’t as black and white as you think they are."

“Happy birthday, Karl.” She shouted back at him, not looking at him as she got into the car.

He still would not give up, and quickly jogged up to her Porsche before she could drive away. He knocked on the window on the driver’s side and said loud enough for her to hear him through the glass. “It's been long enough, Elise. You need to stop beating yourself up for something that wasn’t your fault, or else this will fucking eat you up and you won’t come out of it.”

As a response, she almost ran over his foot.


	2. this is the season for strawberries

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's a hint of a spoiler from series 3, but I went a different route with it so don't worry if you haven't watched it yet.
> 
> ps: I have edited and added new things to this chapter.

Three months later, she received the first package. Her name and address were written in beautiful cursive letters and black ink, but the box had nothing that indicated who the sender was and Elise became immediately suspicious. She stared at it for nearly half an hour before deciding she would take it to the precinct in order to have it examined by the forensics team. Given the nature of her job, she could have easily pissed off the wrong individual at some point and they could be after revenge now. It wasn’t unheard of, specially after the past couple of years, since she started working with the English police more closely.

When the forensics man — tall, slim and bearded, whose name she never really bothered to learn — came back with a smug look of obvious amusement written on his face and an old leather book in his hands, she didn't feel relieved, not really, she felt stupid more than anything. She didn't even bother saying thank you; the mystery of the box may have been revealed, but not the mystery of the book.

As it turns out, the book was written by a Portuguese writer that she had never heard of before, and it only kept her attention for so long before she tossed it somewhere inside her closet. She didn’t read it and couldn't understand why anyone would think to send it to her.

It didn’t end there, however.

A few more packages arrived in the months that followed and she only had to send the first two to forensics before realizing what was going on. By then, the whole thing stopped being a surprise and became a nuisance. For one, she was sure she would run out of space to put them. On top of that, she still didn't exactly understand why someone was sending her such random books. It was a puzzle she couldn't solve, one she had no time to solve and therefore didn't spend that much time thinking about.

Lately she felt tired all the time. Being Commander started to take so much out of her that she eventually stepped down and took her old job back. She would go back to having less responsibility and for now that was something she could handle. After what happened, she couldn’t do her job without constantly worrying that she was doing everything wrong and that it was only a matter of time before she let everyone down. Again. She simply could not live with that nagging fear hanging over her head, reminding her of past mistakes.

She would work her way back up just like she had before, or, at least, that was part of the plan. Elise would prove her worth again in due time and then everything would go back to normal, with her taking back the position that was rightfully hers. She prided herself in doing her job right, after all.

At least, she used to.

The Euro zone was imploding right before her eyes, the whispers that there was a new terrorist attack coming sometime soon were on the rise and they were driving her nuts.

The books could wait. They had no immediate importance right now, and it's unlikely that they would ever stop being just a bunch of old books that didn't interest her in the slightest.

There was this new case that landed on her desk that she couldn't seem to crack and the new commander didn't even bother hiding how much he disapproved of her trying to make the 'serial killer of cops’ label take. Either because she had very little to go on and couldn't find a real suspect or because he was a bigot, plain and simple. He said he didn’t want the police community to be alarmed, but the truth is, they should be scared, someone was purposefully targeting policemen and the motive was far from clear. Any one of them could be next. For her part, Elise didn’t care what the commander thought either way, and she never stopped from trying that angle.

The media channels as a whole didn’t care about the killings either, a fact that made her job both easy and difficult on equal levels. It meant she didn’t have to deal with reporters hungry for a bigger audience, but it also meant that the population as a whole didn’t know what was going on and could do nothing to help her bring anyone to justice. She wondered if anyone would actually bother giving them tips on a case about the murdering of cops. It was just a sign of the times, no one cared about the police, they were seen as the ones who never did anything right.

  
She would only come to understand why that was many months later, as it all went downhill from there when a child they all thought was dead was found unconscious in front of the Calais Regional hospital.

The only lead they had to go on was that the boy was thrown out of a moving car that had no visible license plate, and despite trying to track down the vehicle by checking other security cameras in the area, they eventually lost sight of it. It was the same thing as nothing. Just another haunting case that she began obsessing over until there was nothing else to do but doubt her own abilities as she went through file after file, day after day, to the point where she no longer was getting any sleep.

She even tried helping the child’s father, previously found guilty of killing his own son, as best as she could, paying for his meals and for his room at a decent boarding house downtown, but what good did that do? He spent years in prison for an act he did not commit, he could not find a job because society despised him, and she was the one who had put him in jail. She could not accept that she did that to an innocent man. Then again, she couldn’t accept not finding a killer, either, and she wasn’t sure what was worse: an innocent man who was wrongly accused but eventually found his justice or a guilty man who never did and continued to roam the streets freely.

As if that wasn’t enough, the man was found dead weeks later.

Yet, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

She got another book a few days after the turn of the new year. The writer was called Clarice Lispector, the book was short, its title auspicious, and at that point, Elise was sufficiently intrigued. Something ignited inside her, something she hadn't felt in a really long time: hope. Her heart started beating faster and her thoughts started racing with possibility. She nearly turned her apartment upside down in search for all of the other books that she was sent over the last few months, and when she found them all, she put them down side by side amid the mess on the floor and grabbed her tablet.

There she had it. Authors from Portugal, Angola, Mozambique. Right away the dots started connecting at a frenetic speed inside her head and she thought perhaps those books were all linked to something that would finally help her figure out the case. She kept going: Cape Verde, Macau, and finally, Brazil. It wasn’t the exact match that she had been hoping for, none of it would help her close the case, but it was close enough for her and as she thought about it, she remembered very clearly that some of the cops that were killed had all been involved in taking off the streets prostitutes from Angola, Mozambique and Brazil in the past.

In her mind, that was all she needed to go on.

She understood it, and for the first time since she joined the police force, realized that if she was really going to do this, she would have to do it behind everyone’s back. More importantly, she realized she held no qualms whatsoever about doing that. If she went through the right channels, not only would no one allow her to follow this new lead, no one would understand why she would want to go through with it. After all, the main lead were the old Portuguese colonies and nothing else.

At the same time, though… what about the books? Now that they were all sitting in front of her, she had to wonder. Why? Why only Portuguese speaking authors? How was the Portuguese language relevant?

The books by Fernando Pessoa were the most telling: _poetry_.

 

* * *

 

She was at the commander’s office when whatever good feeling she had slipped right through her fingers.

“Listen to me, Wassermann. You’ve been reckless, distracted, utterly ineffective on every single investigation. Olivier warned me about your, how shall I put it, 'quirkiness.'" he said with actual quotes in the air. "And I have accommodated that as best as I could, but I've had enough. I cannot have one of my officers, as bad as they may be at their jobs, become the lead suspect on a murder case.” The commander told her and she didn't even know how to respond, she was caught off guard, she felt like the ground had exploded underneath her feet and she was free falling along with a rain of debris all the way down to a place where nothing existed. There was no air, no light, no darkness, no hope. She looked at him, her mouth opening and closing in sequence, wondering where this all came from.

The truth is, she had been blind for so damn long that she hadn't even noticed how bad she’d been at her job, how obsessed she had become with these two cases and how everything she did brought her back to the same place. She was running in circles and she wasn't even capable of finding herself at the finish line.

“What murder case?”

“The Jacques Moreau. We weren’t going to bother, he was a drunk and an idiot, even I would have committed suicide if I were in his shoes, but given the circumstances, Olivier thought it was best that we look into it. We found footage of you engaging in a fight with him in front of the boarding house where he lived, and an eyewitness confirmed you were there on the day of his death. So tell me, Wassermann, what you think I should fucking do with you, because right now my only desire is to let them have your fucking head!”

“I can exp—“

“I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT. You are suspended, get the fuck out of my office!”

Elise stayed paralyzed in front of the commander, she had already been dealt a heavy blow, a part of her was expecting more to come.

“I said, GO!” He shouted, pointing at the door in a mockingly slow motion and looking at her like she was a complete lunatic. This time she moved, rushing out of the office like it was on fire.

Now she was suddenly under suspension(and suspicion) and with an indefinite amount of days off work on her hands. She almost started crying when all of her colleagues looked at her like they didn't know what to do as she picked up her things. If not for the books she had received, she wouldn’t know what to do either. All this time, her job was what kept her life going and now the very thing that occupied her daily thoughts was hanging by a thread.

 

* * *

 

 

She went to Karl the following day. She was afraid she would go insane if she stayed a minute longer in France, everything reminded her of her failures, and more than the shadows of war and murder, she became afraid of the shadows of her own mind. She couldn’t escape those. Karl had warned her a long time ago, she should have listened to him.

She didn't tell him about being suspended, though, and he sounded really excited about her sudden ‘vacation.’ “I think that’s exactly what you need. Some time away from everything will help you. It’ll be good for you, is what I mean.”

Help her with what? The case? Elise didn’t care to ask, either way.  
  
She was having dinner with him and Laura at their house when he finally asked, “so, where are you off to, exactly?”

“Brazil.” she answered.

“Oh, that’s lovely! I hear it’s a very beautiful country. Good choice, you deserve it, Elise.” Laura seemed satisfied by the answer, but not Karl. Karl was just frowning at her general direction, holding his glass of wine midway in the air, like he was going to take a sip but stopped before he could.

“That's not random at all. What’s out there, other than beautiful beaches?” he asked sarcastically, finally bringing the glass to his lips. He was smart and he knew more than he should about that case, he knew the last victim had been the one to lead the task force that shut down a brothel filled with Brazilian sexual slaves. It was an easy math, in theory. Elise could only guess what he was thinking and she could tell that he also probably knew she was running after something and it had nothing to do with taking some time off and soaking up the sun at a tropical country.

“I’ve been getting these books,“ Elise stopped there and reached for her bag, taking out the last book that came all the way from Brazil and handed it to Karl. “From different authors of Portuguese speaking nationalities. I thought there might be a reason."

Karl frowned, clearly skeptical of Elise’s reasoning. “A reason? Someone could just be sending you books. Have you thought of that?"

Elise looked at Karl blankly, then at Laura, as if she would be able to explain to her what he was trying to say, or why he would think that was remotely possible.

“Nevermind.” He said. “So you’re going to Brazil, because of this book by Clarice. You don’t know who sent it you. You don’t even speak Portuguese.”

“No, I don’t speak Portuguese.” Elise responded stubbornly and snapped the book back from Karl’s hands, like she was angry.

"Oookay." Laura clasped her hands together, immediately catching on to the growing tension between the two friends. "I'm going to make some tea, would either of you like some? Elise? The usual?" She spoke quickly, not even waiting for an answer as she got up.

(She went upstairs instead of into the kitchen.)

Karl scratched his chin a couple of times, knowing fully well that Elise was going on what would possibly be a destructive goose chase. He was worried, but he knew, he just knew Elise wouldn’t listen to him. This was who Elise had become, she didn’t pay attention, didn’t listen to reason, didn’t care. At the same time, in a weird way, Elise was still way more connected to her instincts than he ever was. It’s possible she knew exactly what she was doing and he was just being over protective, as usual.

“Be honest with me. Do you think that this has anything to do with that case? What makes you think there's a real connection here? Does Astor know you’re going to investigate this?”

She didn’t answer, she was far too surprised by the stupidity of Karl’s guess. Then again, she didn’t even give him any bread crumbs to follow, it's not like she could actively blame him for not getting it.

“Elise…”

“No.” She answered simply, but didn’t elaborate until she saw the way he was looking at her. She couldn't handle it and felt bad. "No, I don't think the books have anything to do with the case, and no, Astor doesn't know." She continued, but came to the realization that the less Karl knew, the better. "That's all I can say right now. Can't you just trust me?"

"Of course I trust you, Elise." He sounded relieved and touched by her honesty, and finally drank the rest of his wine. “You'll be careful?”

She nodded.

 

* * *

 

“I'm sorry if I haven’t been a very good friend to you lately.” Elise said as she started to pull at the sofa bed that Karl had allowed her to sleep in. He had initially offered Adam’s room, but in a rare moment of emotional clarity, she refused.

“It's alright.” Karl smiled ever so kindly at her. “Maya has a boyfriend. Her first boyfriend. Isn’t that crazy?”

“It’s the natural course of life. She’ll soon lose her virginity, if she hasn’t already.”

Karl raised his eyebrows in surprise and couldn’t have been more thankful that Laura wasn’t there to hear that, though she was far more accepting of their children growing up than he would ever be. “God, I hope not.” He sighed.

“I was suspended.” She blurted out. “I'm a suspect on a murder investigation.”

Once again, Karl was left in shock. Elise was always so good at that. “What? And they let you leave the country? They’re letting you leave the continent?”

“They haven’t officially announced they’re investigating me, I can go wherever I want.”

“Do you think that’s wise? Don’t you think you should —“

“Nothing is so simple. You were right.” She cut him off, lying down on the sofa and turning away from him, effectively ending the conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eryka will show up soon, I promise.
> 
> ALSO, Elise is going to be just fine.


End file.
